I have used R. W. Crump’s definitive texts of the poems, as well as the composition and publication dates she provides. For Rossetti’s published poems, Crump follows the copy-text of the English first editions, because these incorporated revisions and changes that Rossetti herself suggested to her publisher (Macmillan). Crump’s texts also incorporate some of Rossetti’s revisions which appeared for the first time in the 1875 volume, Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems. For poems which Rossetti did not include in her published collections, such as those published separately in anthologies, privately printed or never published at all, Crump consulted sources such as manuscripts, authorial rough drafts, letters and individual printings of poems in journals. Her emendations include restoring house spellings to manuscript spellings, correcting typesetting errors, and adopting manuscript paragraphing where the printed paragraphing deviated from the poet’s customary practices.
The punctuation and headings are exactly as in Crump’s texts, which, because they preserve the ‘look’ of the poems as well as their grammar, maintain their visual integrity. For example, like Emily Dickinson (whom she inspired), Rossetti often uses dashes as a musical device. These visually express a drawing out of emotion, a reaching out, or a ‘something almost being said’ (to quote ‘The Trees’, by unlikely Rossetti admirer Philip Larkin). After a colon brings the reader up short, a dash can open the line up again.
In this edition, the poems are presented according to their date of composition, where possible. Multi-part poems composed over a period of years are listed by their final composition date rather than by the date of the first part to be written. Where the composition date is unknown, the poems are arranged by the date of first publication. Poems sharing a publication date, but whose composition date is unknown, such as the children’s poems, are presented in the same order as in the anthology in which they originally appeared.